hollow.lexicon

—In the beginning, the words made the world. In the un-beginning, the world ate the words.

It was 2:23 A.M. when the first book screamed. Not from its spine, nor binding—from the grammar.

Marina Okoro, linguist, boatmother, tethered breath of the lake’s wet whisper, heard it from below decks, where words nested in bundles of radio-static and moth wings. She had been listening to Quechua lullabies encoded in rust—elders’ voices played backwards, vowels spilling like broken salt from their teeth.

“La Pájara Viajera” rocked. Not in waves, but in syntax. The lake was no longer water but conjugation—verbs inflecting under the moonlight. Imperfect past. Conditional present. Broken subjunctive. Marina stood barefoot on the solar panel roof, a cup of coca tea forgotten in her hand. The stars were wrong. They shimmered in the shapes of glyphs she’d only seen in dreaming tongues: Nsidisi, Umunthu, Ch’aska—not names, but recursions, coiling back into the etymological throat of the universe.

She went below.

The children’s books were leaking. Ink ran like fever. A Spanish primer had sprouted feathers and muttered warnings in Yoruba through split pages. The bilingual dictionaries had stopped agreeing with themselves.

Words once held in trust—“tree,” “mother,” “home”—now wriggled and blinked, grew suffixes where they ought not. One Aymara folktale had begun to consume its own punctuation. A comma dove into a period. A period burst into ellipses. Ellipses unraveled into threads of quipu.

Her arm itched. The tattoo—the quipu—was unraveling. Not metaphorically. The knots were wriggling loose, tightening, then unknotting again, as if reading the lake’s mood swings. As if the quipu was remembering something older than memory.

She turned on the shortwave radio. Static. Then whispers.

—We used to speak in pollen. Then in song. Then in math. Then in scream. Then in screamless. —You teach them letters. We teach them forgetting. —We are the syntax of drowning.

She crushed coca leaves under her tongue, but even the bitterness had lost its word. The tea leaves spoke in backward Fula, predicting the death of conjunctions.

Outside, the lake shimmered.

An island blinked and was not. Taquile gone. Just ripples in its phoneme. Another blink: Amantaní stuttered into vowel rot. Gone. The floating isles of Uros tried to paddle away but sank under metaphor. Children’s voices called to her in eight languages. None of them made meaning. Not anymore.

She took a breath. Recited a poem. Swahili to Quechua, Igbo to Spanish. Words twisted and danced, failing but fighting. For every stanza, a star twitched in agony above her, as if remembering what it was to speak.

Marina stood on her boat of babel, skirts flaring in the dawnless wind. Around her, stories turned to birds, to fish, to insects mimicking syllables. She knew then:

Language was not a tool.

It was prey.

And something ancient was hungry again.